boolean.co.nz » Development

Obtain Facebook likes via PHP SDK

Boolean — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 03:11:36 +0000

In an update to this post here is another way to obtain the number of likes for a Facebook page.

I’ll assume that you’ve already registered a Facebook application, have downloaded the PHP SDK and have included for use in your code.

require(‘facebook.php’);

Setup an array with your Facebook applications credentials

$facebook = new Facebook(array(
‘appId’ => ’000000000′, // Put appID here
‘secret’ => ’0000c000c000c000c’, // Put your secret key here
));

Decide which page you wish to obtain the number of likes for

$getRequest = $facebook->api(‘/cocacola’); // Lets look at the Facebook page for the popular soft drink
echo $getRequests['likes'];

Obviously you can consume, contrast and display this information in more exciting ways than simply echoing it to the screen. Enjoy.

Force trailing slash with .htaccess

Boolean — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 23:22:18 +0000

There are a few reasons to force a trailing slash at the end of URLs including SEO

A quick snippet for your .htaccess is below:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /+[^\.]+$
RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ %{REQUEST_URI}/ [R=301,L]

And while I’m here a quick snippet to prevent hotlinking of images. This will redirect all requests to a specified image, simply replace yoursite.com with your own URL, and nohotlinking.jpg with your own image and path.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?yoursite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlinking.jpg [L]

And finally a snippet to put in your image assets folder (you have images stored separately right?) to prevent malicious code execution and prevent directory listing of all your assets.

Options All -Indexes
AddHandler cgi-script .php .php4 .php5 .pl .jsp .asp .sh .cgi
Options -ExecCGI

Firefox cross domain font embedding

Boolean — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 23:24:59 +0000

Firefox has a limitation for cross domain font embedding in that it does not allow you to embed from another website. This .htaccess snippet allows you to bypass this limitation and embed fonts located on another webserver.

Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin “http://thedomain.com”

Use PHP to display Gravatar images

Boolean — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 03:34:25 +0000

All URLs on Gravatar are based on the use of the hashed value of an email address. According to their best practice you should:

Trim leading and trailing whitespace from an email address
Force all characters to lower-case
md5 hash the final string

Of course in PHP this is trivial as the following function shows:

function fetchGravatar() {
$fetchHash = md5(strtolower(trim(‘your_email.address.com’)));
$GravatarImage = ‘http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/’ . $fetchHash;
return $GravatarImage;
}

Profiles are also available if you require them.

CSV to .plist conversion

Boolean — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 08:26:12 +0000

Property list files (.pfiles) store serialized objects and are often used to store a user’s settings. They are also used to store information about bundles and applications in OSX and recently iOS.

Danilo Campos wrote some time ago some background information and provided his source and blogged about the subject. Better than that however, he provided an OSX binary to download if you want to get going straight away.

This little application makes it easy to format and process your source data in a familiar environment like Excel and then convert ready to use in your application.

PHP Host Settings Without phpinfo()

Boolean — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 09:36:05 +0000

Occasionally a webhost will block the very useful phpinfo() command making it difficult to understand any limitations of the server configuration. This script can display relevant information to help you understand what is happening behind the scenes.

$d_func = ini_get(“disable_functions”);
$up_max = ini_get(“upload_max_filesize”);
$up_max = str_replace(“M”,”",$up_max);
$up_max_size = “Megabytes”;
$post_max = ini_get(“post_max_size”);
$post_max = str_replace(“M”,”",$post_max);
$post_max_size = “Megabytes”;
$input_max = ini_get(“max_input_time”);
$mem_limit = ini_get(“memory_limit”);
$mem_limit = str_replace(“M”,”",$mem_limit);
$mem_limit_size = “Megabytes”;
$exec_time = ini_get(“max_execution_time”);
$safe_mode = ini_get(“safe_mode”);

if(!is_null($d_func) && $d_func !== “”){echo “Disabled Functions: \n $d_func”;}
if(!is_null($safe_mode) && $safe_mode !== “”){echo “Safe Mode is Active
”;}
if($up_max >= 1001){$up_max = $up_max / 1024; $up_max_size = “Gigabytes”;
if($up_max >= 10001){$up_max = $up_max / 1024; $up_max_size = “Terabytes”;}}
if($post_max >= 1001){$post_max = $post_max / 1024; $post_max_size = “Gigabytes”;
if($post_max >= 10001){$post_max = $post_max / 1024;$post_max_size = “Terabytes”;}}
if (min($input_max,60)){$input_max = $input_max /60;}
if (min($exec_time,60)){$exec_time = $exec_time /60;}
if($mem_limit >= 1001){$mem_limit = $mem_limit / 1024; $mem_limit_size = “Gigabytes”;}

echo “Maximum Upload Size = $up_max $up_max_size
”;
echo “Maximum Post Size = $post_max $post_max_size
”;
echo “Maximum Input Time = $input_max minute/s
”;
echo “Memory Limit = $mem_limit $mem_limit_size
”;
echo “Maximum Execution Time = $exec_time minute/s
”;
?>

PHP Modulo Operator For Alternating Rows

Boolean — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 22:24:50 +0000

Alternating row colours within a grid of data can make for a more pleasant viewing experience and has become a popular styling method in recent times. I was a little incredulous at some code I saw recently to determine alternating rows so without further introduction, meet the Modulo operator which is a quick and easy way to get up and running:

for($i=0;$i<10;$i++){
if($i % 2){
// This is an even row
}else{
// This is an odd row
}
}

I’m sure you will be able to apply this to your own css or styling within your loops.

Use cURL to obtain remote filesize

Boolean — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 11:00:46 +0000

Sometimes you might want to determine a remote file size prior to determining further action to take. This is a quick function that utilises cURL to retrieve the file size in bytes.

function remoteFilesize ($URL){
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $URL);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$info = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$info = explode(‘Content-Length:’, $info);
$info = explode(“Connection”,$info[1]);
return $info[0];
}
?>

Usage is simple:

echo remoteFilesize(“test.com/file.html”);

Get Facebook Likes and Shares via Graph API

Boolean — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 01:46:44 +0000

Facebook Like and Share count can easily be obtained from the Facebook Graph API. This is an extremely quick way to look up the JSON response from Facebook so that you can further process it for your own requirements.

$URL =’https://graph.facebook.com/cocacola’;
$JSON = file_get_contents($URL);
$Output = json_decode($JSON);
$Likes = 0;
if($Output->likes){
$Likes = $Output->likes;
}

echo “Number of likes for CocaCola’s Facebook Page = “.$Likes.”
”;

$URL2 =’https://graph.facebook.com/http://www.coca-cola.com’;
$JSON2 = file_get_contents($URL2);
$Output2 = json_decode($JSON2);
$Shares = 0;
if($Output2->shares){
$Shares = $Output2->shares;
}

echo “Number of shares for coca-cola.com = “.$Shares;
?>

UPDATE 29/01/2012: I’ve written a slightly different method using the PHP SDK in this post here

Currency Conversion using Yahoo Finance API

Boolean — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 00:54:08 +0000

Just a quick and dirty PHP function to retrieve information from the Yahoo Finance API to perform a currency conversion

function ConvertCurrency($From,$To,$Amount){
$URL = ‘http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?e=.csv&f=sl1d1t1&s=’. $From . $To .’=X’;
$Handle = @fopen($URL, ‘r’);

if ($Handle) {
$Result = fgets($Handle, 4096);
fclose($Handle);
}
$allData = explode(‘,’,$Result);
$Value = $allData[1];

return $Value * $Amount;
}

Usage:

$Amount = ConvertCurrency(“NZD”,”USD”,25);